As a history teacher, it is eminently important that I always have an answer at the ready for one of the most common questions of my students : “Mr. Gibson, why we gotta learn this stuff?” I will never forget the first time I was asked this, and how happy I felt that I had thought and rehearsed my answer long beforehand. I just happened to be being evaluated at the time, so I hope the ease with which my answer flowed would translate to some sort of bonus points in my salary. “We live in a democracy.” I said, “ Because a you are going to grow up and make decisions about what this country does, it is important that you understand the impacts of these decisions, that you see how decisions, ideas, and events in the past have affected past societies.” In short, a well functioning democracy depends on educated electorate.
As each day passes that statement becomes even more true than the day I actually said it. What's more, it is becoming less true of electorates and more true on its face. If knowledge is power, it is becoming more diffuse in our society, as information becomes less controlled, less centered in the hands of the powerful (such as high school history teachers). In 2025 it is going to matter less what governments do, and more what the global citizen in the street does with it.
The role of the educator, therefore, is not to simply repackage information. Tomorrow's student won't need that. By the time he is in middle school he will, hopefully, already know how to get his hands on any facts he desires within a matter of seconds. What he requires, are institutions that give him direct experience molding and shaping that knowledge into something meaningful. This is true for all subjects at all grade levels.
The challenge therefore, become engaging all students in these learning experiences, and that happens by making them related in a direct personal way to the students. One way to give issues, events and cultures human faces, is by connecting classrooms across the globe into cross cultural collaborative learning environments. Technologies such as skype already enable affordable video and audio sharing. Pairing students with classmates overseas is a way for them to work on issues their two nations share, or maybe even disagree on. Dialog at this level is perhaps where real progress can begin in long standing disagreements and global tensions.
This is of course only one example, but the vital components are to have the students choose something to work on, some problem that affects them, and show them how they can harness knowledge to empower themselves to make a positive change in their own lives. Having students create businesses, petitions, having them participate in their community in effective self-directed ways, these are the authentic learning experiences that teachers of the future should looking to.
